The Enterprise Open Source Blog

Why to Encourage Software Developers to Debug and Extend Open Source

Posted by Nicholas DiPiazza on February 8th, 2012 in Support

So let’s say your company Acme Inc. hosts several software applications that are based on open source technologies. Your development team seems to be pretty skilled at writing code, and for the most part utilize these open source libraries effectively.

For example, you have a Jboss Application Server hosting your web application (an open source application server), use Maven to manage your dependencies, JMeter to test your software, and so on. All sorts of open source software elements are scattered about.

At this point (whether you realize it or not) – you utilize open source technology heavily and rely on it for your company’s success.

But then during the testing of a production release, you encounter a software bug in your open source library that is a blocker (a “blocker” is a term used to describe a bug that prevents key functionality in your application). In a panic, every one of your developers struggles to find a way to get your release to come out on time.

Thankfully, one of your rock star developers pulls down the source code for the open source library from the internet, gets a build working on this development environment, identifies the issue in the code, fixes the problem, repackages the library, and the updated version of the library is used. Problem solved, disaster prevented, release is on time!

Proprietary Software Support vs. Open Source Support – Common Misconceptions

Posted by Nicholas DiPiazza on January 27th, 2012 in Support

Many people in the business world prefer to use proprietary software instead of open source software due to the misconception that proprietary software is better supported than open source software. After several years of supporting both open source software and proprietary software, it becomes clearly evident that just because you pay for proprietary software does not mean that supporting that software is any easier; in fact, there are plenty of reasons why supporting open source software is actually easier.

Let’s identify the set of steps you would take to handle a support issue for proprietary software.
First, you would have a system administrator consult the software documentation to learn more about the issue at hand to find a solution to the problem. If the administrator cannot resolve the issue with the use of documentation, then do one of the following:

Tomcat Support for an Old Web Application

Posted by Nicholas DiPiazza on December 9th, 2011 in Support

In my experience, people having issues with Tomcat web applications are usually experiencing new issues, from old applications, and are definitely some of the hardest to resolve.

The Issue
Let’s say you work for the Acme Company, and your company hosts a web site based on the open source Apache Tomcat web container. Customers can log in and order Acme products (hopefully Wile E. Coyote has Wi-Fi access) and internally, Acme business applications might use web services provided from the Acme web application.

Things have been running smooth for more than a year. Minus a few errors here and there, the site has been running exceptionally well for a long time. But then BAM! Suddenly, one day, your web application experiences a major issue. The web site is too slow. Users are not able to log in anymore. Or maybe the site goes down every so often and requires a reboot.

Whatever the problem is, surely Acme’s CEO, CIO, and any other business partners, are barking fire and demanding that someone resolve the issue quickly and promptly.